Page 37 of What Boys Learn

“No.”

She was worried about Grant, but she was terrified about the cops, and getting in trouble, and facing their dad and Martha.

“Stop—”

But this time, instead of humoring her, Ewan whipped around, hands clutching her throat. For a second, her feet were off the ground. She couldn’t breathe.

“Stop?” he shouted. “Stop what? Stop talking back to me, skank.”

Her feet were back on the ground, but his thumbs were still drilling into the front of her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. The only sound that came out was a series of clicks.

“Youcostme, Dogface. I’m not fucking around.”

When he let her go, she stumbled forward, landing on her knees. She stayed on all fours, coughing and fighting tears. But she wasn’t shocked. They’d been here before. She knew how far he’d go.Thisfar, and she was still okay.

In the distance, a cop called over a megaphone, telling someone to stop running, but the cop sounded more annoyed than hostile.

“They’ll catch you if you go back to the car,” she managed to say over her shoulder.

“They won’t.” Her brother was never afraid. “Especially when I tell them my baby sister went missing and I need to hurry up and find her before she falls into the creek and drowns.”

This last part he found hilarious.

She was clinging to the wordsister. The entire phrase:baby sister. Even if he grabbed her and choked her and teased her, he would protect her in the end.

“Head that way, we’ll pick you up at the next trailhead. Then we’ll drive across the state line to make sure the cops don’t follow.”

When she got to her feet, he was gone. She walked the trail through a moon-silvered darkness, wanting her brother, the very same one who’d just hurt her and left her on hands and knees, breathing in the smell of dirt, mud, leaves. Would he be there, at the next trailhead, in thirty minutes? Would he rescue her?

The trail was wide and it paralleled the road so close she could hear cars speed by. She didn’t want to walk the shoulder. It was safer staying hidden in the trees. The alcohol in her system kept doing funny things. For a few minutes after throwing up, she’d felt better. Ewan’s choking had adrenalized her, sending fizzing Pop Rocks through her veins. But now that she was walking in the dark, her senses started to dull again. She was drunk, and it was only getting worse as the last few beers hit her. Twice, she fell down for no reason, ankles suddenly twisting.

When she made it to the trailhead, no one was there. Maybe Ewan and Grant had gotten there already and left. Maybe the cops did stop them after all. Or maybe they went joyriding elsewhere, to pick up more vodka or beer. She positioned herself near the entrance road, sitting on the grass, arms around her knees, head bowed. When she tried to look up at the stars, they were moving in circles, like in one of those time-lapse videos. She brought her face to her knees again and only woke once a car pulled up. Her brother called out the window:Dogface. Wake the fuck up.

The memories until then had been blurry, but from this point forward they were more than blurry, they were fragmented, tiny slivers of light and sound with great big black curtains separating them. Even when I tried, I couldn’t bring more of them back.

The girl I was then and the woman I’d become were equally stymied trying to force more memories to the surface. But of course, the darkness protects as much as it obscures. The memories don’t deserve revisiting.

The only part that can’t be denied is the very end, when I woke to the sounds of Grant and my brother arguing—Ewan most of all, taunting Grant for something he’d done earlier that night or hadn’t been able to do, calling himwhiskey dick, whiskey dick. I didn’t know what that meant. I only knew that men called each other dicks all the time. I woke up twice or maybe three times, when Ewan leaned on me too hard, pushing his way over the armrest and into the back seat to reach for a bottle of vodka. He came back with a pair of unfamiliar tennis shoes that he chucked out the window, and a girl’s wadded-up underwear that he shook in front of Grant’s face before pushing them into his own front jeans pocket.

The girl’s abandoned clothing and the smell of something foul alerted me to the fact that something had happened back there—and yet I didn’t ask. Maybe they gave a girl a ride during that hour I was on the trail and falling asleep in the trailhead parking lot. Maybe something else happened, too, but it had nothing to do with me. It had been a bad enough night, already, and I was embarrassed about all of it: the hope I’d had, the flirtation I’d imagined, the hurt I’d allowed, the way I’d acted like a little kid, getting drunk and vomiting and making a mess of myself.

As we sped east, staying on country roads just north of the Illinois border to avoid the state cops they’d already talked to at the forest preserve, I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t ask questions. I surrendered to blackness again until I felt sudden physical pressure as Grant took a curve too fast and we left the road—the two of them still arguing, shouting—and barreled down a slope. My eyes flashed open as the car flipped.

Grant never walked away from that accident. Maybe he didn’t deserve to.

Ewan and I did.

15

From Wednesday through Friday, nothing happened. No calls or emails from Summit, asking me to come speak to the board or informing me about my fall contract, or even answering my question about when I should come and finish emptying my office. No major news about the investigation of Sidney’s and Izzy’s deaths, although there’d been one press conference, clarifying that they were being investigated as homicide cases, possibly linked. No visits to the pool. Benjamin had stopped asking.

I was surprised that Curtis hadn’t emailed, as promised. He’d seemed so friendly. Flirtatious, even. But in my self-critical state I could find plenty of reasons he’d change his mind.

Still, I succumbed to the temptation to google him. I found dozens of articles about his first bestselling book,How Children Grow. It had come out when I was in grad school, drowning in academic reading, with zero interest in a parenting guide about preschool children, especially since my own child was a preteen by then. My work and study schedule left no time for podcasts or magazine browsing during those years. But this next time, he’d be harder to miss. His publisher’s website said a sixteen-city book tour was already planned. The cover and title were already uploaded to online bookstores:What Boys Learn.

That’s exactly what I needed to know—what boys pick up from the world around them, and what they carry within, and what any of us—mothers especially—can do to make sure our boys become decent, undamaged, and undamaging men.

I thought of calling Curtis directly and asking him to accept Benjamin as a client, but Curtis had already told me. He was shutting down his practice. End of story.